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EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole.

There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.

EAs in the survey come mainly from a set of 5 high-income western populations.

The USA’s share of the EA population has decreased over time.

The UK has relatively higher support for Global Poverty and lower support for AI Risk than the other main countries.

The USA and Canada have a smaller percent of veg*n EAs compared to other large national cohorts of EAs.

Continental European EAs countries have particularly high rates of local group membership.

In this post we explore geographic differences in EA across the globe. A plurality of respondents reported being located in the United States (36.33%), followed by the UK (16.19%). It seems worthwhile to investigate if these populations are distinctly different from EAs elsewhere. This may help to point to causes or dynamics in the movement that are being missed to due to the dominance of these two nationalities.

[An] additional analysis which would be great is if you could identify the 20% of the respondents who seem most involved and dedicated, and then repeat the analysis by source for this sub-group. This would give us some sense of the quality as well as the scale of the reach of different sources.

In this post we explore which EA groups EA Survey 2018 respondents were members of. We find reasonably large numbers of EAs are members of some groups (such as EA Facebook and Local Groups), but much smaller numbers are involved across many groups.

EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole.

There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.

Median donations were slightly higher than in 2016 and total donations much higher

A small number of very large donors account for the majority of the totals donated

A majority of EAs report donating less than they would like due to financial constraints

This post explores donation data in the 2018 EA Survey, investigating how much people are donating, where they are donating and what influences their donations.

1891 out of 2607 (73%) self-identified EAs in our sample offered data about their donations. This is a significant increase from the 2017 Survey where we had donation data from 1019 EAs out of 1853 (54.9%).

In this report, we will explore the difference between those who self-identify as effective altruists versus those who say they broadly subscribe to effective altruism but do not self-identify. As there is variation in levels of involvement in the effective altruism movement, we were interested in assessing people who are outside the scope of the typical analysis.

Past reports in the EA Survey Series have exclusively reported only on respondents who are aware of effective altruism, subscribe to effective altruism, and describe themselves as effective altruists.

To perform this analysis, we used three questions* to classify people into two segments – “subscribers” and “identifiers.”

Subscribers are defined as those that are aware of effective altruism and broadly subscribe to the ideals, but do not identify as effective altruists

Identifiers are defined as those respondents that are aware of effective altruism, broadly subscribe to the ideals, and identify as effective altruists

We’re excited to continue what should be a lot of analysis and thoughtful conversation over the results from the 2018 EA Survey. This post outlines methodology and subsequent posts will outline different facets of the results that we analyzed and found noteworthy for the community.

The EA survey provides an annual snapshot of the EA community. Although it does not sample randomly from all effective altruists, it does provide an important glimpse at demographic attributes among those who have taken the survey. From these respondents, we observe that the majority of effective altruists look demographically much like those in past years. After cleaning the data and limiting the data set to those who declared that they self-identified as effective altruists, we sampled a total of 2,607 valid respondents for this report. In total, we surveyed 3,537 people. More people took the effective altruist survey than ever before, and this additional data enables us to look at the demographics of the effective altruism movement in more depth. In this report, we also aim to explore the characteristics and tendencies of EAs, including diets, political beliefs, careers, and relationships.